


skin you with my tongue

by meritmut



Series: your skin suits you best [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Insecurity, Monster girls and the monster boys who love them, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 10:29:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19944697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: She is cursed: this much has been apparent since she was a small child picking the dirt out of her own wounds in the unkind country that raised her. This—this just feels like overkill.





	skin you with my tongue

The scales wrap all around her forearms, blotches of mottled hide crawling up past her elbows to blossom in dark swathes over her shoulders, whole areas of her body covered now in the varicoloured hide of a serpent.

 _Scales_. This is the word that comes to mind, is the only word he knows for the strange not-skin she tries desperately now to hide behind scrabbling hands and bent knees, eyes stark with horror and it takes his stuttering brain too many broken moments to process _why_ —why she should _want_ to hide, why in all the stars she can possibly be ashamed.

Humans do not have scales. A child could tell you as much, but the simple fact slams back into Ben’s head far too late because he’s already seen all of her, Rey, bare and soaking wet from the ‘fresher she was still climbing out of when the bond came alive: Rey whose body is a curious patchwork of brown and bronze and ivory, sun-stained in places and sun-starved in others, and in some all the shades of the desert night.

This is what takes him the longest to compute. His eyes rove helplessly over those miles and miles of exposed, _glistening_ skin until abruptly Ben remembers himself, drags his gaze down to the floor because staring at her feet seems a safer bet, only her feet are lovely too and this might stand a chance at being the strangest observation he's made today, if he hadn't then noticed the ink-black scales crawling over her toes and thought they looked pretty too.

He can't remember ever thinking something like _pretty,_ yet around Rey it seems impossible to think anything else.

The fleeting glimpse of her long thighs and rounded calves might be enough to kill him outright (and if he lets his eyes linger any longer she'll do the job herself), but Ben can't get it out of his head. Her legs are marked too, between her hips and her scarred knees, shifting in colour and shade but still giving the overwhelming impression of _inhuman._

Humans do not have scales.

Rey is a marvel in many ways.

She is cowering away from him, now, her body twisted awkwardly to keep as much of herself as possible from his sight, arms wrapped around her torso and legs pressed close together, her face turned away from him and hidden beneath the damp curtain of her hair.

Ben’s brain is still struggling to manage a single coherent thought, never mind spew out actual _words,_ but when his tongue manages to form sound it shouldn’t surprise him that it takes the shape of—

“Rey?”

She goes rigid, an elaphus in the headlights, every muscle straining taut as he takes a hesitant step towards her.

“Don’t.”

**

  
He listens, she thinks, which is a wonder. Too repulsed to do otherwise, probably—naked as she is there’s no keeping from him what she has tried so desperately to hide, even from herself, since she crawled out of that Force-choked cave and realised she was different.

That she had become a monster.

Rey clutches herself tight, willing the Force to make her invisible or else erase her altogether. Under her fingers she feels the unfamiliar shift where soft mammalian skin becomes something else, something _other,_ something that does not completely belong to her. It's more than just her skin: she can feel it inside her too, the parts of her that even now are changing, too many teeth crammed into her human mouth and joints that click and crack whenever she moves with her human limbs. If they still are human.

If she still is _her._ She does not know, truly.

She is cursed: this much has been apparent since she was a small child picking the dirt out of her own wounds in the unkind country that raised her. This—this just feels like overkill.

And even though he was her enemy, though even now she cannot be sure what he is to her or she to him, from the moment she'd taken stock of her new appearance Rey has carried the strange, quiet dread in her heart that Ben will somehow learn the truth. That he will _see_ her.

Even then, when she was so angry she thought she hated him, she had been afraid of what he would think if he knew what she has become.

Blunt nails scratch ineffectually at her sides, over new-healed scars where she had tried to scour that truth from her own flesh and find something less unsightly underneath.

And he’s still watching her.

 _Stop,_ she wants to beg him. _Don’t look at me. Can’t you see I’m—_

Something only the wasteland could love.

No one has ever touched her with softness: she is as much a stranger to intimacy as she once was to the wide ocean and the sweet salt wind. No surprise, then, that when his fingers brush her upper arm it takes Rey entire seconds to process the sensation of it. Her head jolts up, staring in mute dismay as Ben trails his hand down past her elbow to where her scales begin, then further, over the bony knobs of her wrist and the sun-damaged back of her hand until he can twine his fingers with hers.

His hands are strong, big and blunt-fingered and so so warm. She wants to get hers away from him—she should, but when she tries to jerk free he just holds her all the tighter and gives her hand a little squeeze, bringing the broad bulk of his body closer to hers till she can feel the warmth of him emanating outwards like durasteel left out in the sun.

Whatever part of her is something other than human opens to that warmth, as if she were one of the lizards that would coil under the midday sky in the Badlands, soaking up the heat to bear it down inside their bodies into the dark. She tilts toward him unconsciously, every part of her—even the parts she scarcely recognises—drawn toward that strange and unknown thing, _contact_.

He shouldn't be touching her. She's blighted, she's a _monster,_ she is the very thing she once hurled at him and she—

Lips touch her shoulder, the softness of another’s hair like feathers falling on her skin and sending shivers of something other than terror trilling through her.

Rey squeezes her eyes shut so even if her tears escape they won’t get far.

“Don’t,” she whispers again, and feels him exhale against her shoulder.

“Why?” he breathes, the fingers of his free hand skimming over her scales so gently it is almost a caress.

No. Not almost.

Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. She grasps his hand tight.

"You're beautiful," he tells her solemnly.


End file.
